The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential ... in Business and in Life

The Power of Less introduces Leo Babauta’s ideal of productive minimalism. His approach focuses mainly on the development of good habits as the key to long-term changes.

Anyone interested in learning how to achieve more by working less

Anyone who wants to learn what productive minimalism could be like

Anyone who feels overwhelmed by their life

Productivity and minimalism are the two main topics Leo Babauta deals with on his blog zenhabits.net. Over the course of his career as a blogger, Babauta quit smoking, began jogging, lost the weight he needed to, became a vegan and paid all his debts. Time magazine ranks him among the top 25 most influential bloggers in the world.

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The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential ... in Business and in Life

Synopsis

The Power of Less introduces Leo Babauta’s ideal of productive minimalism. His approach focuses mainly on the development of good habits as the key to long-term changes.

Key idea 1 of 10

If you want to work effectively, limit yourself to the essential.

In today’s world, all of us do, consume and produce more than ever before. Day after day, we’re bombarded with information and receive dozens, even hundreds, of emails and phone calls prompting us to do something.

Many of us use our energy to take care of everything and be everywhere without differentiating between the essential and the inessential. Productivity techniques are designed to help us take care of as much of everything as possible every day.

But having alottodo isn’t the same as actually gettingalotdone. Most of the time, people who have a lot to do end up doing a lot of unimportant, unnecessary things.

In order to stop that from happening, we have to set limits for ourselves and force ourselves to focus on the essential things.

And by limiting ourselves to the essential, we manage to achieve the greatest impact with the least amount of effort.

People who limit themselves learn to concentrate on what’s truly important to them in all areas of life. By consciously tackling fewer things in a day, they can do a good job of taking care of what’s truly important. Because limiting our focus to our most important projects – as opposed to working on 20 projects at once – will enable us to finish these few projects quickly and successfully.

Deliberately limiting ourselves forces us to work effectively on the things that will really help us move forward.

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